Notes on a tenth year

I don’t remember when I started this blog. The first post dates back to June of 2005, but I’m reasonably certain it existed in some form before then: I remember writing about the 2004 NHL finals and I have foul papers of NFL posts in notebooks dating back to 2003. So, in one way or another, I’ve been doing this a long time.

A lot’s changed in that time frame. The Internet’s a different place: ten years ago I couldn’t have imagined a site like Grantland, where there’s daily interesting takes on sports and pop culture. After all, one of the reasons I started writing was my general dissatisfaction with writing coming out of Toronto. I was sick of writers like Steve Simmons, Damien Cox and Al Strachan, people who reflected a viewpoint I didn’t share.

At the same time, I don’t really remember what the Internet was like back then. I suppose Bill Simmons was writing for ESPN, but I barely knew who he was. Both Deadspin and Truehoop were a little ways off and while I was one of thousands of people who started a blog back then, I genuinely don’t really remember reading anyone else’s: I just started writing online because I was already writing offline, in chapbooks, spiral notebooks and on an ancient IBM laptop that ran Windows 95 and barely at that.

Which has always been my raison d’etre, really. I’ve never worried about traffic and over the years, it comes and goes. I’ve always consciously written stuff I’d like to read and if nobody else does, I don’t care. Maybe not the best attitude, but it’s how I’ve always felt.

Over the years, being a borderline interesting sports blogger has given me some interesting paths. There was a blog founded by a bunch of teenagers who asked me to write a mailbag column, there was my spell writing a MVP column for Hardwood Paroxysm and, most memorably, I was a featured columnist for The Good Point for about five years.

That last one was easily the most rewarding experience I’ve had in these ten years and not jut because it was my only paying gig. Austin, Andrew and Rob, if you’re reading this, thanks for everything. You’ve been a big influence and I learned a lot from you all.

I’ve actually given thought to pitching an oral history of The Good Point to, er, someone, since it was an interesting, wild and talented place for a number of years. Just a casual look at the list of contributors is like a who’s-who of young sports writers: Andrew Bucholtz, one of Yahoo Canada’s/Awful Announcing best writers and as ambitious as anyone I’ve ever met; radio personality Chris Pope; Leigh Ellis, co-host of NBA-TV’s The Starters; John Matisz, Sun Media’s go-to hockey writer. There have been others, too.

I think if you track my writing over the years there, you can see my evolution as a sports blogger, going from a self-made sports guy to someone who’s really more interested in the margins and what happens off the field. When I started, I was interested in writing about events; by the time I stopped, I was more interested in talking to female writers about why female sports are ignored or how people are making sports culture more open and accessible. It’s to Austin Kent and Rob Boudreau’s absolute credit they never spiked my columns because they weren’t jock-ish enough.

Indeed, I think I’ve changed too. Back in 2005 or so, I intentionally set out to re-create myself as something approximating a sports guy. Like most people, I have my demons and this was something of an attempt to combat them: maybe by remaking myself in a certain image, I’d be able to drop them. It hasn’t worked that way, but that’s a learning lesson, too.

And now, a good ten years on, I’ve realized I’m not really that guy and maybe I never was. You can probably read it if you look deep enough into my articles and how they’ve evolved over the years. I’ve dropped the Hunter Thompson inspired prose, started reading authors like Imogen Binnie, bell hooks, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kate Bornstein, people who’ve challenged how I see the world and myself.

Which is a way to say I’m not going away – if anything I’ve been more prolific than I’ve ever been lately – but I’m not the same person anymore, either. There’s a lot more to life than sports.